ANAHEIM : Officials Doubt Boy’s Fatal Illness Spread

It is unlikely that a Rio Vista Elementary School student who died last weekend of a massive blood infection could have infected his classmates, officials said Tuesday.

Health and school officials said they doubt the 8-year-old third-grader was contagious Friday, two days before he died of septic shock at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. And in the unlikely event that he was, it is doubtful anyone at the school came in close enough contact with him to acquire the bacterium that killed him, doctors said.

“As a rule, a school is not a likely setting for an outbreak of this disease,” said Dr. Nick Anas, director of CHOC’s pediatric intensive care unit. He said close, personal contact with the carrier is required to transmit the boy’s illness. He said being directly coughed on would be one of the more likely ways for the disease to infect another person. “But this disease will not carry across the room.”

Both he and Dr. Hildy Meyers, epidemiologist for the Orange County Health Care Agency, said that parents of Rio Vista students should not be alarmed by the death and that only members of the boy’s immediate circle of family and friends require preventive medicine.

“If a (Rio Vista) child develops a cough or muscle aches or weakness or becomes lethargic, then the parents should take their child to their pediatrician or family doctor,” Anas said. “But a perfectly well child requires no preventive treatment.”

School officials said Tuesday they know of no other Rio Vista student who has become seriously ill in recent days.

The boy, whose name has not been released, suddenly became seriously ill Saturday afternoon, officials said, when he developed a high fever, body aches and a rash. He was taken by his parents to an Anaheim emergency room and then transferred to CHOC, where he died Sunday afternoon, officials said.

Doctors determined he had been infected with a bacterium that can cause the life-threatening illnesses of meningitis and septic shock.

Between 2,400 and 2,700 cases of the disease are reported nationwide annually, according to medical texts. There were 38 cases in Orange County last year, Meyers said. The number of fatalities is not yet known. There were two deaths among a similar number of cases in 1992, she said.